The Winners of the 2015 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize

The winners of the 2015 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize

The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung opened the 2015 Hans-and-Lea-Grundig-Prize for entries in autumn 2014. The jury has now awarded the prize to Olga Jitlina, an artist from St. Petersburg; Lith Bahlmann and Matthias Reichelt, a curator and journalist, both from Berlin; and to a project at Bauhaus University Weimar that was coordinated by Ines Weizman, an architectural theorist. The jury was co-chaired by Dr Eva Atlan, curator of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, and Dr Eckhart Gil- len, an art historian and curator from Berlin; it also consisted of Professor Irene Dölling, Henning Heine, Professor Ladislav Minarik, Dr Rosa von der Schulenburg, Oliver Sukrow, Dr Angelika Timm and Tanya Ury. The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung awards the prize in memory of Hans and Lea Grundig for services to art, aesthetics and art mediation. Hans Grundig (1901–1958) was an anti-fascist artist from Dresden who was banned from working under the Nazis, arrested numerous times, and held between 1940 and 1944 in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Lea Grundig (1906–1977) was repeatedly arrested by the Nazis before leaving for exile to Palestine from 1939 until 1948. The prize was first awarded by Lea Grundig at the University of Greifswald in 1972, but the award only continued until 1996. In 2011, the Rosa-Luxemburg- Stiftung took over the competition from the University of Greifswald. In 2012, the prize was awarded to Oliver Sukrow, whose master’s thesis at the University of Greifswald focused on a historical-critical analysis of Lea Grundig’s controversial function as president of the East German Association of Visual Artists from 1964 to 1970. In 2015, the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize for art was aimed at contemporary pieces that could be described as “diasporistic” in the sense of R.B. Kitaj. “The diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies at once.” Diasporistic art “is contradictory at its heart, being both internationalist and particularist. It can be inconsistent, which is a major blasphemy against the logic of much art education, because life in Diaspora is often inconsistent and tense; schismatic contradiction animates each day” (First Diasporist Manifesto, 1989). More and more people are experiencing inconsistency, resistance, migration, exodus and exile; they live in one or more societies at the same time, but also dare to make art that is political in its radical- ism. Submissions to the art history category were to develop and explore the biographies and work of artists who had been persecuted and forced into exile by the Nazi regime. The art education category, in contrast, was dedicated to the mediation of socially critical museum and non-museum pieces from the 20th century in today’s cultural contexts.

The award winners

Olga Jitlina — winner in the art category Olga Jitlina is an artist from St. Petersburg who was born in the city in 1982, when it was still known as Len- ingrad. She is a child of the disintegrating empire of the USSR; a time of moral and economic decline and unfulfilled hopes for the establishment of a new, just and democratic society. She has learned to question herself, but also to protect herself from the temptations of old or new systems of belief and thus avoid the pain of disappointment. This is reflected in her humorous, interdisciplinary, poetic artistic language that covers everything from the roots of subculture to the flowers of civilization. The interdisciplinary nature of her work requires teamwork, but she provides the ideas and takes on the roles of designer and producer. Jitlina graduated with two degrees from St. Petersburg: in 2005, she completed a degree in philology at the Petersburg Institute of Jewish Studies; in 2007, she finished her art history degree at the Russian Acad- emy of Fine Arts. Since 2005 (when she was still a student), she has gained increasing levels of public atten- tion as an artist. Her academic background combined with her versatility helped her to quickly find a group of like-minded artists, and she now organises collaborative projects between different forms of media and artistic disciplines. She submitted four pieces to the competition. She developed a board game entitled Russia, The Land of Opportunity – migrant labor board game to enable everyone to experience the adversity facing migrants from the post-Soviet republics in today’s Russia. Her work From the 90-ies to Richmond articulates the experiences of Russian migrants in the US after leaving behind their home (country). Hodja Nasreddin on Mobile Discotheque is a performance piece for public spaces that challenges the dominant national- religious formative. Nasreddin in Russia. newspaper, issue 1, 2 (issue 3 has also since been published) is a satirical magazine in which the stereotypical ‘rogue’ from the Turkish-Islamic-influenced space between the Balkans and Central Asia plays out his knowledge-enhancing combination of folk wisdom, cunningness and crude humour in Russia. In the performance The Bronze Horseman, the area surrounding the Bronze Horseman statue in St. Petersburg is humbly cleaned by a brigade of migrant cleaners before they appro- priate it as a site of collective self-reassurance. Jitlina transforms central contemporary social issues through her original artistic language, with a humorous touch. She uses her great interest in the lives of “ordinary” people to subtly and subversively contrast the poetry of lived life with the empty pathos of the exercise of power. Jitlina’s work has long been displayed to international acclaim in countries such as Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Austria and Italy; this has yet to occur in Germany. The jury was therefore even happier to support the work of this young and active artist by awarding her the 2015 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize, alongside prize money of €4,000, safe in the knowledge that she will soon gain further recognition from and delight audiences in Germany. www.olgajitlina.info

Lith Bahlmann and Matthias Reichelt — winners in the art history category Lith Bahlmann and Matthias Reichelt have been awarded the 2015 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize, including €3,000 in prize money, for their art historical piece Ceija Stojka (1933–2013) — Sogar der Tod hat Angst vor Auschwitz. This work provided the first extensive study of the drawings and paintings by the Austrian Rom Ceija Stojka. As a child, Stojka was deported to the concentration and extermination camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. During the late 1980s and until 2012, Stojka used an artistic and documentary genre to attempt to come to terms with the traumatic experiences she made during the Holocaust. Bahlmann and Reichelt’s trilingual (German/English/Romany) monograph of nearly 500 pages documents the almost 250 ink drawings Stojka produced between 1990 and 2012, together with the poetry she presented on the back of her illustrations. Lith Bahlmann is a freelance writer and curator who lives in Berlin and has published a number of catalogues containing artist’s monographs and produced exhibition publications; Matthias Reichelt lives in Berlin and is a freelance journalist covering cultural issues, as well as an author, curator and editor. Bahlmann and Reichelt displayed the vast majority of Stojka’s ink drawings and gouache paintings at Kunstverein Tiergar- ten — Gallery North, in Berlin. A selection of paintings was also on display at Galerie Schwartzsche Villa, belonging to Kunstamt Steglitz. In addition, the memorial and remembrance centre at the former concentration camp in Ravensbrück presented a collection of images by Ceija Stojka as part of a special exhibition that was organised in relation to this project. Bahlmann and Reichelt relied on personal records and conversations with Stojka and her relatives, as well as secondary literature. Commendably, they also enlisted the help of three other writers to secure a wide-ranging picture of the artist and her work. This also meant Stojka’s work could be studied from various angles. Whereas the historian Barbara Danckwortt describes the stages in the extermination policy targeting Sinti and Roma, the Hungarian art historian and Roma activist Timea Junghaus studies Stojka’s work in relation to the development and identity of Romani art and culture. In contrast, the Viennese director Karin Berger provides a subjective report about her engagement with the issue and work with the artist, resulting in two film portraits. Through in-depth research and professional appraisal, together with highly personal testimonies, Bahlmann and Reichelt’s book brings knowledge and awareness of the genocide committed against Sinti and Roma to a wider audience and contributes to ensuring that this issue is more firmly anchored in remembrance of the Holocaust. Ceija Stojka’s oeuvre is one of very few accounts of the genocide committed against Roma and Sinti from the perspective of a surviving Rom. “The Roma subaltern can only speak if the Roma minority will step out into the hegemonic territory and appear as a real power broker, and this is a much greater task than simply ‘identifying with some kind of imagined subalternity’” (Timea Junghaus). www.ceija-stojka-berlin2014.de

Aus dem zweiten Leben. Dokumente vergessener Architekturen — winner in the art education category The winner in the art education category was a collective research and film project developed and exhibited by students from Bauhaus University Weimar’s Faculty of Architecture and Faculty of Media in the summer of 2014. The project combined historical research with its own film production. In many ways, this project was a successful experiment in university teaching and research as it enabled young filmmakers and artists to gain extensive insights into architecture, and students of architecture to learn filmmaking. The project’s approach to collective research led to a very special form of the appropriation of history: the study of urban spaces, buildings, plans and documents was linked to the documentation of people’s life stories in a manner that resulted in a wide-ranging research network. This network included a broad literature review, inquiries in urban and private archives and collections as well as written correspondence and interviews with family members, residents, historians, heritage conservationists and experts. The research was therefore highly embedded within correspondence and friendships, which — and this is particularly the case with lesser-known architects — brought with it an unexpected recognition of a family member’s life’s work. The research focused on nine in-depth studies of German-Jewish exiled architects and began with thirteen students taking a ten-day study trip to Israel and the West Bank. The findings were presented in an exhibition at Bauhaus University using nine presentation tables, and nine films of approximately 25 minutes each. The following students were involved in the project: Ortrun Bargholz, Riccarda Cappeller, Martin Girard, Ayla Güney, Vera Heinemann, Eva Maria Körber, Tim Mahn, Ana Paula Nitzsche, Lucas Pod- zuweit, Tamara Popovic, Sebastian Richter, Ferdinand Salzmann and Julia Tarsten; they were supervised by Professor Ines Weizman, Professor Wolfgang Kissel, Wolfram Höhne and Markus Schlaffke. The project is to be continued and aims to explore the lives of migrant architects in the 20th century and so to add new pages to the architectural history of modernism. In awarding the prize, alongside the €3,000 prize money, the jury recognised the project’s unique format for collective research between students and researchers, as well as the international networking involved in the project and its theoretically-grounded, interdisciplinary, media-based approach. www.uni-weimar.de/aus-dem-zweiten-leben

Special mentions by the jury The competition met with enormous interest and this was echoed in the more-than-260 submissions that the jury received, many of which were from abroad. Some of these submissions were particularly notewor- thy and reflected the high standard of the competition. The jury would like to issue a special commendation to the following outstanding works that reached the shortlist.

In the art category, special commendation goes to the following submissions (in alphabetical order):

1. Yevgenia Belorusets (Berlin/Kiev) for her photo series of coal miners from Donbass

2. Esther Dischereit (for her publication Blumen für Otello. Über die Verbrechen von Jena. Klage lieder, Secessionsverlag Zurich 2014); and Regina Weiss (Berlin) and Hannah Maischein (Munich) for their photographic interview project Sprachlose Gegenstände stoßen uns an Nachdenken über Theodoros Boulgarides (2014) — both submissions covered the NSU)

3. Tanja Ostojic (Berlin) for her four submissions: Naked Life 2 (2011), Misplaced Women? (2011/13), Sans papiers (2004), and Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000/05) 4. Luise Schröder for her catalogues Arbeit am Mythos (Deutscher Kunstverlag Berlin/Munich 2013), Die Historische Front (2013), and Ortsbegehung-Stadtrecherchen zur Shoah und Täter_innen- schaft, and her videos Die historische Front (installation 2013), Ein nationales Denkmal, bestehend aus einem Brunnen mit einem versenkbaren Stein, auf dem täglich eine frische Blume liegt (installation 2013), Facing the Scene (Luise Schroder and Anna Baranowski 2011), Arbeit am Mythos (installation 2011), Projektion einer Revolution (installation 2010), and 27. Januar 2008 (installation 2008)

A special commendation in the category art history (in alphabetical order) goes to:

1. Burcu Dogramaci (Munich) for her book Fotografieren und Forschen. Wissenschaftliche Expedi- tionen mit der Kamera im türkischen Exil nach 1933 (Jonas Verlag Marburg 2013)

2. Anna-Carola Krausse (Berlin) for her dissertation Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993) Leben und Werk (Reimer Verlag Berlin 2006) and her catalogue of works on Lotte Laserstein (Philo Fine Arts Dres- den 2004)

3. Martina Sauer (Bühl) for her essays on aesthetic experience in the work of Anselm Kiefer

4. Astrid Schmetterling (London) for her article ‘I am Jussuf of Egypt’: Orientalism in Else Lasker- Schüler’s Drawings (Ars Judaica. Bar-Ilan University/Israel 2012)

The jury recommends that the competition organisers find a suitable manner to publicise the winning and shortlisted works, for example, as an exhibition. The jury also recommends that a Hans and Lea Grundig symposium be organised for 2016 to involve the winning artists and researchers alongside relevant experts in the preparations for the 2017 competition. Intensive dialogue with relevant actors from the art world, academia and social movements should enable the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize to gain its own reputation and a recognised cultural position. The 2015 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize will be awarded on 26 November 2015 in Berlin on the evening before the events marking the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung’s 25th anniversary.

More information is available at: www.hans-und-lea-grundig.de www.rosalux.de/news/41471 «Der im Jahre 2012 erstmals von der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung vergebene Hans-und-Lea-Grun- dig-Preis wurde an den Kunsthistoriker Oliver Sukrow für seine an der Universität Greifswald verteidigte und mittlerweile veröffentlichte Masterarbeit Lea Grundig: ‪Sozialistische Künstlerin und Präsidentin des Verbandes Bildender Künstler in der DDR (1964 – 1970) (Peter Lang Verlag: Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2011, 275 S., DDR-Studien. Bd. 18) vergeben. Mit der Beleuchtung des Spannungsverhältnisses zwischen dem eigenständigen Kunstwollen Lea Grundigs und ihrer Tätigkeit als Kulturfunktionärin leistet er einen wichtigen Beitrag zur histo- risch-kritischen Aufarbeitung realsozialistischer Kunstverhältnisse und der Biographie von Lea Grundig. Während das Caspar-David-Friedrich-Instituts der Universität Greifswald Universität wegen der ‹staatstragenden Rolle› Lea Grundigs den Hans- und Lea-Grundig-Preis seit 1996 nicht mehr vergeben hatte, hat sich Oliver Sukrow mit seiner Arbeit gerade diesem umstrittens- ten Kapitel der Biographie Lea Grundigs gewidmet und gezeigt, dass ihre Kunst zwar nicht ohne politische und ästhetische Position entstanden ist, in ihrer Geltung aber nicht auf ihre Einbin- dung in die kulturpolitischen Verhältnisse der DDR reduziert werden kann. Insbesondere bleibt die Beziehung zwischen sozialistisch-kommunistischer Orientierung und jüdischer Kultur ein weiter aufzuarbeitender Aspekt ihrer Biographie.» (Begründung der Jury)